Photo: Alexa Garbine
Some students at the Delbarton School in Morristown, New Jersey, called it “The Lost City.” The moss-covered, carved marble columns had reposed in a forest on the school’s grounds at St. Mary’s Abbey as long as anyone could remember, and no one really knew where they had come from.
In 2008, TPL began the process of acquiring the forestland from the Order of St. Benedict for addition to the adjacent Lewis Morris County Park. In preparation for the sale, the 74 fluted column shafts, 14 Corinthian capitals, and associated marble bits were hauled from the woods to a school parking lot, their origin still unidentified.
You can read the rest of the story on NJ.com in a piece written for The Star-Ledger by Thomas Diges.
Now, the debates can stop. The decades-old mystery of the columns has been revealed, thanks to a set of chance encounters involving an architecture historian, a Benedictine monk and a Chatham master gardener.
It is a fascinating story touching on John Jacob Astor and Philadelphia department-store magnate John Wanamaker. You have to wonder if the mystery would have ever been solved if the columns had remained in the forest, visited only by students in search of solace or a place to sneak a smoke.
“It was a wonderfully mysterious place,” said Brian Regan, of the class of 1973. “It looked like some great temple that had been taken down, or torn down.”
You can read TPL press releases on the original protection effort here and here.
